Review:
There’s definitely ‘something’, there in the Arizona desert. You probably wouldn’t have to go further than Tucson’s own Howe Gelb and all the incarnations of Giant Sand for that feel of sand constantly flowing through the air and then falling all over the place.
But then there is the Tucson trio The Myrrors, a true psychedelic affair of another kind, and Borderlands, their fourth album proper is here to prove it. Like Gelb, they also include all psych elements they could find, from Grateful Dead/early Pink Floyd kind of drones (‘Formaciones Rojas’) to jazz psych blast akin to the genius of Albert Ayler (‘Awakening’). Oh, everything else in between. Yes, the sand is all over, but instead of falling all over the place, it is picked up by the wind which suddenly stops and leaves the sand hanging in the air, letting your imagination think and decide what it is going to find when the sand finally settles on the ground. It can be a complete heavenly garden, or a true horror, like the images created by Michelangelo Antonioni in his Zabriskie Point and the accompanying soundtrack created by Pink Floyd along with touches of Grateful Dead, incidentally.
It seems that in many ways The Myrrors have conjured all the spirits that were present when both Floyd, Dead and the others ( the spirit of David Lindley and his then band Kaleidoscope can be heard in ‘Bizangas’) created the Zabriskie Point soundtrack.
But The Myrrors obviously had their own vision in mind, as they say, themselves this is “an album that nominally references the collective boundaries we draw, all the while offering a soundtrack for setting forth strategies that either ignore or erase our self-made barriers.”
In essence, for Borderlands, The Myrrors may have conjured all those Zabriskie Point soundtrack spirits, but they have mixed all those sounds up, and like the Arizona sand, have thrown it up in the air and let it hang out there.